The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: Doctor Zhivago, Major Dundee, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,

With his "Dollars Trilogy", Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone reinvented the Western genre as we came to know it. Hyper stylised, violent, and perpetually operatic, Leone's iconic partnerships with actor Clint Eastwood and composer Ennio Morricone pioneered a new genre path, with the director's European sensibilities leading to an exaggerated but no less compelling picture of the American West, which many would argue reached a peak with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, or perhaps 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. (The oft-forgotten Duck, You Sucker! is also just as deserving of being in that conversation.)

But while those films are each themselves masterpieces, not nearly enough praise is given to his sophomore Western, For a Few Dollars More.

The perfect compromise between the epic scope of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the tight freneticism of A Fistful of Dollars, Leone's 1965 sequel partnered Eastwood's Man with no Name with Lee Van Cleef's Man in Black, the latter of whom ends up stealing the whole production with a twinkle-eyed performance that belies the character's tragic past.

Eastwood and Van Cleef's partnership is an act of perfect chemistry, and the final duel between the duo and the film's villain, Gian Maria Volonté's El Indio, may just be Leone's finest hour.